Posted
by
samzenpus
on Monday May 12, 2014 @04:09AM
from the star-family dept.

An anonymous reader writes "A team of researchers led by astronomer Ivan Ramirez of the University of Texas — Austin has identified the first 'sibling' of the sun, a star almost certainly born from the same cloud of gas and dust as our star. 'Astronomers had been observing the star for almost two decades without realizing it's the long-lost sister of the Sun. No doubt we have catalogued other solar siblings whose common heritage has yet to be discovered. Indeed, the UT team, lead by astronomer Ivan Ramirez, is confident that the identification of HD 162826 is just the beginning. "We want to know where we were born," Ramirez said in a statement. "If we can figure out in what part of the galaxy the Sun formed, we can constrain conditions on the early solar system. That could help us understand why we are here."'"

From grammar. In most languages of the world, the word for Sun is male. Exceptions are the germanic languages, where the Sun is female, and interestingly though slavic languages, where the Sun is actually a neutrum.

Romance languages go Sun -> Male, Moon -> Female. Semitic languages go Sun -> Female, Moon -> Male . Exact opposites yet quite close geographically. Long story short, assignment of gender to inanimate objects is largely arbitrary unless the object really looks like a penis or a vagina. Bunch of pervs that we are. Not that the two or three billion people who speak genderless languages aren't pervs. Japanese, for example, is genderless.

Although the word sister can also mean "of the same type or origin", and is often used in English to describe similar things, especially if they come from the same place. You often hear of "sister ships" or "sister cities", and although these words have gender in other languages, they don't in English (though it derives from gendered languages). I think it's in this sense that the article refers to the "sun's sister".

Interesting. There is an asymmetry between "brother" and "sister" in the dictionary: "sisters" may mean a kinship group of objects, but "brothers" may not. The article consistently refers to stars as “it” (except for sister stars), so I endorse your interpretation.

On average, that star has only been moving away from the sun at about 16 miles per hour. There are people who can run faster. Yet after these billions of years, even that snail's pace has been enough to put 110 light years between us.

To reply to my own comment, it's unlikely that that star has been moving away at a steady speed though. Most likely it's been through an insane trajectory that has at times taken it very far away and at times closer, as it orbits around the center of the milky way along with the sun.

The paper is freely available online and you can see distance and speed estimates on the bottom row of charts at page 13: http://www.as.utexas.edu/~ivan... [utexas.edu]

This star is thought to have been following a fairly predictable orbit over the last 4 billion years, which is one of the reasons why they're able to point to it as a potential sibling of the Sun. That is the researchers think that there is a decent probability that it has based on a simulation.

To reply to my own comment, it's unlikely that that star has been moving away at a steady speed though. Most likely it's been through an insane trajectory that has at times taken it very far away and at times closer, as it orbits around the center of the milky way along with the sun.

Not necessarily. We know of several associations of stars called "moving groups" (the Ursa Major/Big Dipper constellation is largely the core one such group) that have a common origin -- they have the same space velocity vector, and are the same age, and are still relatively close to together in space after hundreds of millions or even billions of years (the Zeta Herculis Moving Group appears to be the oldest known so far -- somewhat older than our own sun). The shared vector means that the stars in a clust

* "What caused the Big Bang in the first place?"* "If energy can never be created, nor destroyed -- the universe has always existed in some form -- then Why do we even exist at all?", that is,* "What is the purpose of the universe?" (Answer: Relationships, which is just a short way of saying "To Know Itself.")* "Why does Time appear to only flow in one direction?" (Answer: The brain wasn't designed to perceived the infinite; only the linear, otherw

A friend of mine would scold me for not scolding you about the difference between gender and sex.

Uh, in the natural state, they are the same thing. You have to apply technology to making someone appear a different gender on the outside sort of but you cannot change their sex. The reality is that everyone can tell the difference between a natural woman and a transexual. It is blindingly obvious and no amount of facial surgery can change that.